1 Dr Katrina Navickas, School of Humanities, De Havilland Campus

1 Dr Katrina Navickas, School of Humanities, De Havilland Campus, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, Herts, AL10 9AB. Luddism, Incendiarism, and the Defence of Rural „Task–scapes‟ in 1812 Attacking property was one of the most common forms of expressing a grievance during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Arson in particular crossed the permeable boundary between person vengeance and collective action against an individual or group perceived to have transgressed community norms or expectations.1 Attacking machinery, either by fire or by force, also featured within the varied repertoire of methods of intimidation, protest, and resistance in the eighteenth century. James Hargreaves‟ first spinning jenny was forcibly dismantled in 1767; in 1779, cotton weavers demolished carding engines around Blackburn and Richard Arkwright‟s water frames at Chorley; machine–breaking flared up in parts of Lancashire, the West Country, and the Midlands in 1780 and again in 1792.2 The development of „Luddism‟ in 1811–12 has, however, overshadowed these previous outbreaks of machine–breaking, and of other forms of destruction of property more generally. The intensity of Luddism, its geographical spread, and the panicked if not severe response of the authorities, gave the agitation of 1811–12 a peculiarly compelling character and legacy. Luddism was unique in its adoption of the 2 mythical leader „General Ludd‟ as its moniker, as I have shown elsewhere.3 However, the tactics of Luddism in effect comprised of a more extreme version of more general popular resistance against changes in both industry and agriculture in northern England from the late eighteenth century onwards. Attacks on machinery and other forms of property did not emerge out of nothing or nowhere in 1812, but reflected customary tactics used in the new circumstances of a common fear of national rebellion. This article argues that Luddism can only be understood within longer and deeper frameworks of social tensions and popular resistance in particular localities. Crucial to this understanding is an awareness of ancillary activity occurring in the fields, woods, and bye–ways alongside the set–piece attacks on powerloom weaving factories and woollen shearing mills. Contrary to perceptions of its industrial character, Luddism was not a solely urban phenomenon. Using a case study of the Horbury district in the West Riding, this article shows that Luddism, and especially popular fear of Luddism, was heightened by ancillary activities, both criminal and customary, occurring on the semi– rural peripheries of urban–industrial areas. The semi–rural, semi–urban environment and landscape of the industrializing Pennines shaped the disturbances of 1812. Many of the smaller Luddite machine–breaking incidents were accompanied by secret meetings, military–style drilling, and stealing arms. These acts were often conducted in a semi– urban environment on the edge of arable land on the fringes of industrial villages or on the turnpikes over pastoral moors. Furthermore, agricultural machinery and grain stacks were attacked in „Luddite districts‟ in the West Riding, well before the more commonly known „Captain Swing‟ agitation in the early 1830s. Referring to studies of rural unrest more generally, Andrew Charlesworth has lamented the tendency among historians to 3 compartmentalize protest into „urban‟ and „rural‟ categories „in a way more befitting twentieth–century conceptual dichotomies than eighteenth and nineteenth–century realities‟.4 This article avoids those categorizations by demonstrating the interplay between urban and rural societies, economies, and customary forms of protest and resistance. Why were workers and labourers attacking machinery and other types of property from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries? Marxist historians sought to portray Luddism and indeed the Swing riots as „movements‟ within a wider chronology of working–class resistance to laissez–faire Smithian capitalism. Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé sought a class–conscious „proletariat‟ among the rioters. Defeated in their quest for class, they concluded that shared ties of tradition and custom confined the mental world of labourers. In their view, therefore, „genuine‟ collective organization on a class model was restricted until the emergence of national industrial trade unions in the 1840s and their agricultural equivalents in the 1870s.5 Later interpretations sought political radicalism in Luddism and Swing. Historians sought to fit the movements into the narrative of the emergence of plebeian reform societies in the run up to the 1832 Reform Act.6 Early labour historians, followed by the sociologist Charles Tilly, constructed a Whiggish trajectory of modernization. According to their narratives, popular protest underwent a progressive „transition‟ during the industrial revolution from customary, localized, and individual forms of protest to organised mass membership movements, especially trade unions and political societies. Luddism and Swing were perceived as „pre–industrial‟, and therefore were a backward obstacle to this progression.7 4 Luddism and rural resistance more generally cannot be reduced to such singular frameworks. The agitation was not about the development of working class consciousness and the politicization of the poor en route to democracy. Kevin Binfield‟s analysis of Luddite letters and my own rethinking of the myth of General Ludd have shown how the agitation of 1812 was not as simple, defensive or reactionary as it has been portrayed. It rather involved a complex web of demands and grievances, regional differences, and identities.8 Once we take away the old meta–narratives of class formation and politicization, however, we should not be left with the impression that the agitations were discrete outbursts, unrelated to local contexts and other forms of resistance. In relation to early modern protest, John Walter has called for a broader view, arguing that crowd actions should be regarded „not as isolated events, spasmodic and reactive, by in terms of protest – as one, if key moment, in a history of longer term negotiations‟.9 Adrian Randall is one of the few historians to place Luddism within its longer and broader context. His detailed examination of episodes of machine breaking from the mid– eighteenth century through to the Swing riots will not be repeated here.10 Rather, this article builds on his approach with new evidence and interpretations. Recently, Randall and other historians of rural resistance have revised the grand narrative of the Swing riots that had been set in stone by Hobsbawm and Rudé‟s monumental study, Captain Swing. New studies of the Swing riots in southern England are acutely sensitive to regionally– specific causes of change and of resistance to change. They argue that the incendiarism and machine–breaking of the early 1830s cannot be understood without full appreciation of local circumstances and structures of authority. The mythical character of „Captain Swing‟ helped to give the movement a pan–regional coherence, but historians should not 5 generalize the causes and consequences of its spread.11 This article applies these ideas to Luddism in 1812, arguing that the specific local context played a large part in shaping popular perceptions of the disturbances more widely. Machine breaking was not a spontaneous tactic of last resort, or a desperate outburst of violence by labourers unable to „progress‟ to the next „stage‟ of class– consciousness. Workers usually exercised the tactic against a considered selection of targets, and it accompanied negotiation, striking, and other means of placing pressure upon employers.12 The outbreaks of unrest must be situated within a wider and longer context of socio–economic tensions, often expressed in conflict over customary rights. Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, artisans and textile workers were incensed by what they regarded to be their employers‟ displacement of individual skill for the cheap efficiency of mass production.13 Custom was central to the agitations. For E. P. Thompson, Luddism was the „crisis point in the abrogation of paternalist legislation and in the imposition of the political economy of laissez–faire upon and against the will and conscience of the working people‟.14 The movement was a spirited defence against the removal of customary regulations concerning wage levels and apprenticeship by manufacturers and other authorities increasingly enamoured by the Smithian economics of the free market.15 Hobsbawm and Rudé dismissed the popular defence of custom as reactionary, but more recent historians have returned to Thompson‟s definition of custom as a more vital, if still defensive, element of workers‟ lives and worldview. Randall emphasizes the deep and often bitterly fought defence of customary regulations from the mid–eighteenth century to the 1830s. This is not to deny that early trades unions were gaining power and popularity in the early nineteenth century; we 6 should not go back to the old Fabian view that workers were disorganized until after the Combination Acts that had prohibited collective bargaining were repealed in 1824.16 Yet this printed regulations of trade shops and their strikes were only the outer, more extraordinary face of trade unionism. Privately an „inner world‟ persisted that was designed not to be understood by outsiders, especially not by manufacturers and local authorities.17 The main characteristics of Ludd were not rational

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